For me, Alberto T and Valerio V the time has come to draw conclusions of this wonderful first year of operation.
We want doing it publicly thanking all of you who helped us achieving this feat!

Really thank you to:

Caterina Bonora and Alessandro Tassinari, you were the first to believe in our project and to promote it in the FabLab Modena, then in Civibox and in all the startups’ areas.

Flavio Odorici and Alberto Baraldi from Evotek Engineering for their constant and patient activities within the project as developers and councilors, as well as sponsors of our activities. Perfect hosts ready to welcome us in any activities of this first year.

Antonio Ciao, Gabriella Oliva and Mario Romeo from Tempo di Vivere ecovillage for their continued support in the various project activities, and their support to our group’s human resources management.

Andrea Gallerani and Giuseppe Busi from Aicon Industry for their availability, their support and enthusiasm to collaborate in our project.

Ivan Righi and Marco Righi from Kaitek for their interest and availability to collaborate with us.

Professor Enrico Artioli to his availability, his involvement and his commitment to welcome us to the event “Settimana della Scienza e della Tecninca (Week of Science and Technology)” at Modena’s I.T.I.S. Fermo Corni school institute.

Federico Trombi and Gianni Sighinolfi from B.Engineering for providing us a space in their workshop to prepare and convert the Ford Fiesta.

Alessandra Zagni from Nuova Ferrari e Zagni for her willingness to help us realize the conversion of the Ford Fiesta, a valuable future cooperation.

Andrea Casarini, Ivan Menozzi and Matteo Ferrari for their practical and moral support, and their continued interest in iaiaGi project.

Felice Accardo and Stefania Braga for believing in this idea and having recently joined the project developers group.

Next project’s steps will be to buy the Ford Fiesta and start working on the actual conversion into electric. We faced some troubles the past week, when we discovered that the Italian law does not permit us getting in free loan the car workshop one of our project’s developers promised us. Thus, we had to move to a new direction, and we promptly got a new solution: we will work in a private house garage. This is something similar to what happened to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak when they started up Apple computers, or to Bill Gates with Microsoft. We hope this will bring us good luck!

We started to officially develop iaiaGi project on May 4, 2014. During the past 18 months, we consolidated our idea and we got aware of its strength. They were 18 months of contacts, discussions, studies, attempts and evolution of us and the project. We started with one person and currently we are 15 actual developers. We got an average of one developer per month. This is an excellent result. Focusing our attention to the past four weeks, we started the process to buy the car we want to use to build our first official ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) conversion into electric vehicle. We are near to buy it and begin our research’s practical activities. However, what is the iaiaGi project?

iaiaGi (which is an acronym that stands for Integrated Automotive Idea for an Advanced Galileo Ferraris finding Implementation) is a project to build an open hardware, open source development platform for the electric mobility. We inspired our project idea to the Arduino device development model. iaiaGi will generate all the documentation and all the hardware to be used for traditional vehicles conversions into electric. This will be available in the form of a kit that anyone can use to convert its car and/or develop a new zero emission vehicle. We thought to our development platform as a way to reduce electric vehicles cost and to collect all the improvements coming from an open culture model.

During the past 18 months we also better understood the potential of our idea, thus we introduced many new concepts in the fields of environment, human being and solidarity economy. These are the foundation of our project, which aims to be one of the first examples of technology applied to a new social and economic model that respects the environment as a basic resource we have to preserve for our successors. The project keeps the human condition and promotes any efforts to make its technological content human being compatible. The mutual knowledge and experience exchanges are developed with the objective to realize a smooth human inclusion in the project. They are preserved as richness. We do all our efforts to promote a solidarity economy, with a focus on the bioeconomy model. All these concepts are within reach of a technological project as iaiaGi is.

This post, after a relatively long pause, is just telling that we have not stopped. We are simply working, maybe silently, maybe too silently, but working hard.

Last months before the summer vacation period have been mostly focused on participating to important initiatives as the Climate Launchpad 2015 competition and the Festival Ecofuturo. These activities were aimed to gain visibility and widen our networking. Most probably the time and effort spent in participating to these events has slowed down the actual work on the conversion. But it wasn’t really wasted time because an innovative project needs visibility and needs more people, more feedbacks, more options, more ideas. We cannot afford to work on our own, in the closed workshop to discover at the end that world is going somewhere else, we need contact, we need confrontation with reality. And it was indeed a learning exercise.

However, as we got back from summer vacation, we realized that our development group was simply ready to start working on the real thing. The conversion fundamentals are clear at this moment.

We know what vehicle we want to convert: a 6th series Ford Fiesta, made around the 2009. The whole team is searching the web and our contacts to find one at a good price, a real bargain. We do not need a readily running car, we can also work with a lightly damaged vehicle, we will fix it anyway. We should make it in less than 2000 Euro.

We have decided the engine model (HPEV AC-51) and the controller (Curtis) to use in our powertrain. The engine was dimensioned through the calculations implemented by our calculation sheet. The controller is a natural choice for a DIY project and will allow a lot of learning and, why not, hacking as well!

We have recently also dimensioned the battery cells to be used in our project. We have chosen LiFePO4 3.2V cells with 100Ah capacity. The dimensioning was mainly driven by the minimum possible capacity that may allow the motor to deliver similar performances as the gasoline vehicle, especially in terms of maximum speed.

We will most likely find a suitable BMS here in Modena, there are factories producing such devices here at hand.

Last, but not least, a new member has joined the team, a professional mechanic, passionate with electric mobility. Nothing better! He has offered to the project a dismissed workshop near Modena, which we will use to work on the firts conversion. That’s a big hit!

So, we have clear ideas on the main components. We are sure that once the Fiesta will be in the workshop, we will jumpstart the work to replace the old engine in a brand new AC electric motor.

If you want to know all the details of our project developments, please consult the Meetings page, where we publish all our weekly meeting minutes.